When we last spoke with conceptual media artist Kim Asendorf, he declared himself “one of these guys awaiting teleportation.” While Asendorf, unfortunately, still remains firmly rooted to planet Earth, his art is now traveling through space at the speed of light as the first GIF ever to be broadcast to (hypothetical) extraterrestrials. Sure, it’s not quite teleportation, but it’s a 17.6 light-year step in the right direction.
The piece Asendorf selected for the launch of Lone Signal—a site devoted to “crowdsourcing messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence”— is called Humans Looking at Digital Art. Compared to the bombastic content of much of his other work, this GIF seems a vanilla but rightfully cautious choice: you wouldn’t start an exchange with a new pen pal by telling them about all your unsavory extra-curricular activities. That being said, the GIF does introduce aliens to another oddity of our existence: the claustrophobic nature of contemporary art.
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Kim Asendorf’s GIF, currently being broadcast to space.
This navel-gazing work will reach Gliese 526, a red dwarf star in the constellation Boötes, in 17.6 years. Though the piece was originally created in 2011 to be viewed by actual human beings, its recontextualization for aliens seems entirely apt, as viewing digital art is still a fairly alien experience for most art aficionados
Lone Signal, while providing a platform for Asendorf’s piece, is actually most concerned with inseminating the heavens with Tweet-like messages they’re calling “beams.” Charging 25 cents per text-based “beam,” Lone Signal makes sending messages to the cosmos via the Earth Station more affordable than mailing a postcard to Europe.
The project seems to capitalize on the recent interest in sending everything from photographs to music to space, a trend we reported on last year following a string of back-to-back space-related art initiatives. In Lone Signal’s first 24 hours, users from the general public and alpha beamers have already sent images that range from from photos of fractals to fine art to parents with their children.”
Some of these messages include:
—“What’s up dude..!!! I think, i am smarter than you. Let’s have a cuppa tea.”
—“so are you alien guys into dragons coz i’m a dragon”
—“You don’t want to come here, it smells like anus and there are humans that eat their own shit, but if you come, we can make out someday.”
Naturally, one of the first messages sent to space needs to include cats and burritos.
Lone Signal’s website describes how, in order to ensure seamless delivery, astrophysicist and planetary scientist Michael W. Busch has embedded a binary encoding scheme in Lone Signal’s beams; this system is based on universal laws of physics, and thus is likely to be legible to life-forms with advanced technologies comparable to ours (after all, anyone who’s anyone is on Twitter).
Addressing obvious concerns about opening a can of wormholes, the website provides a PDF of the research performed by Dr. Jacob Haqq Misra, that opens, somewhat unsettlingly, with: “Does transmitting radio messages into space pose a risk to human civilization?” While the scientific conjecture, in the PDF, is found via a series of advanced formulae, the real answer obviously depends on the annoyingness of the messages people send. From the looks of the current dispatches, our future may be grim.
